Technologies Reach Across Campus, State—and World
- By Linda L. Briggs
- 04/19/04
Collaboration Within the Classroom
At the Wharton School of the University
of Pennsylvania, a product that’s not intended specifically for classroom
use has become a popular collaboration tool. Rob Ditto, senior IT project leader
at Wharton, explained that the school is in its sixth year of using eRoom, a Web-based
collaboration product from Documentum, to create a collaborative classroom environment.
The Web-based eRoom product provides a universal data repository that can store
and manage a number of data types, and an application programming interface (API)
that allowed Wharton Computing and Information Technology to customize it further.
Specifically, the school has created a customized version of eRoom, which the
school calls webCafé.
The software not only provides easy-to-use Web-based tools for courseware management,
but the IT group at Wharton has customized the product to offer additional interesting
collaborative features. The software is now used each year by all 11 Wharton
academic departments in over 400 courses and 6,900 students across all of the
school’s curricula.
For example, webCafé provides virtual "rooms" for collaborative purposes. Using
a variety of Web browsers, faculty and students can use the rooms to discuss
and vote on topics of interest; share and search for documents, group calendars
and task lists, and collaborate on projects online, regardless of location.
"We saw an opportunity when we selected this platform to tackle two problems
at once," Ditto said: "[It offers] a good and easy way for faculty
to put class information up on the Web, and collaborative possibilities for
students working in groups."
"We saw an opportunity when we selected this platform to tackle two problems
at once"
The popularity of the program is evident—faculty are free to elect to
use the tool or not, and over 60 percent of courses now incorporate webCafé.
Its popularity may come at least partly from the software’s fundamental
ease of use. Faculty actually use the product themselves, Ditto said—a
good sign with any technology tool.
One collaborative way that Wharton uses the software is in helping groups of
students work together on a project. Every course’s eRoom at Wharton has
the ability for ad hoc groups to create project folders, share files and track
revisions. Some faculty have opted to use a custom tool that the IT group has
developed to allow students to use eRoom to check online, see who is in a group
and which groups are full, and join a particular group.
Another popular—and somewhat unanticipated—collaborative use of
the software has been its voting function. "As soon as we started to offer
it," Ditto said, "we saw faculty starting to use it [as an] informal
voting tool to help a collaborative group arrive at a decision." In some
cases, Ditto said, other tools might be better for actual secure voting, but
the use of the product points to a truth about software, whether collaborative
or other—users will bend a popular technology to make it fit their needs.
As popular as the collaborative classroom technology has proven to be at Wharton,
why haven’t more schools adopted similar strategies? Cost might be one
reason, Ditto hypothesized. "We’re a bit of a lone wolf in using
relatively expensive collaboration software," he admits. Also, administrators
facing myriad other challenges, especially security, may see collaboration as
"an extra," Ditto said, "something nice to have but not essential."
Also, when he helped the school choose eRoom in 1998, more specific classroom-intended
products weren’t fully mature. "It helps that at that time, course
management wasn’t a well-defined software capability... Blackboard and
WebCT were just getting started." Today, it might be tougher to sell top
administrators on using eRoom as the collaborative tool it’s become for
the school.
Collaboration Between Classrooms
At
Georgia Institute of Technology
in Atlanta, innovative approaches to collaboration are both in place and under
further development, including work on a distributed learning environment that
allows students in different locations to review multimedia lectures. That project,
directed by Lonnie Harvel, is called eClass, and builds on Classroom 2000, an
earlier work at Georgia Tech by associate professor Gregory Abowd and Jason Brotherton.
Harvel is a senior research scientist at
Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering; he’s also the director of the
Digital Media Lab and associate
director of the
Arbutus Center for Distributed Engineering Education.
The Classroom 2000 project integrated technology and multimedia in the classroom
by freeing students from frantic note taking during multimedia lectures. Instead,
electronic whiteboard, audio, and video equipment capture the classroom experience,
allowing students to access it on a laptop computer later—along with instructor
notes and student comments. After the lecture, a program weaves the recorded
events together into material that can be viewed through a standard Web browser.
Students can replay the entire lecture, or can choose a portion of it from a
timeline.
In the new project, eClass, Harvel is taking things farther by creating a distributed
environment for Classroom 2000. "We sometimes have classrooms in multiple
locations, and they may not even be connected to the Internet," he explains.
"You can use [eClass] to transfer information—and also to capture
everything in every class." Students can now access the information alone
or as a group over a wireless connection using laptops or even PDAs—meaning
students can review a specific classroom experience anywhere with an Internet
connection. Harvel explains that to him, distributed education means that learning
"can happen at any time or anywhere" and "collaborative means
collaboration across geographic distances."
"[Learning] can happen
at any time or anywhere" and "collaborative means collaboration across geographic
distances."
Georgia Tech has captured and is making available well over 3,000 lectures
and 117 courses. One of Harvel’s challenges has now become search and
storage capabilities, as he works on better ways to store and access the data.
For example, he wants to allow a student to search for just those classes he
or she attended, since the system tracks who was present. The relationship between
students, their captured learning experiences, and their notes is maintained
in the Concept-Context Cache, an XML-based data system. An information storage
technique, the software keeps track of what students are working on, and with
whom. "Part of the design is to allow them to share segments with others,"
Harvel explains.
Harvel is also doing work on a collaborative technique called classroom capture,
in which "a group of students are brought in [and] handed a problem that’s
beyond them. They collaboratively explore it, find out what they know and don’t
know, and figure out how to solve it—and even what constitutes an answer."
This summer, Harvel plans to put "the final tweaks on eClass," with
the intention of launching it into 11 classrooms in the fall. The goal by fall
of 2006: to have it in use in 150 classrooms, and to make sure the program is
simple enough from a user’s point of view that, "If the professor
has a laptop and projector, they can use it."